In his audience is former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson. The setting once again is late 1800s Texas and Captain Kidd makes an early appearance reading his newspapers, reporting the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment allowing the vote to all men regardless of race or color. Seven years before the wonderful News of the World was published there was this one. I will surely add her two earlier books to my list now, and eagerly wait for whatever she does next.
I seem to be reading her books in backward order, as I started with News of the World, her latest book. Really though, how can you write about the West without it, if you want the whole story of what it took to survive in that time, and the courage needed to try? Paulette Jiles includes the violence, but then gives us the most beautiful prose to make up for it. The author also miraculously gets us to understand the native American mind-set, and in so doing shows us the heartbreak and tragedy of a brave people who couldn't fight white man's progress.Ī warning to those who don't like violence this book has a lot of it. It's also the story of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker sent to work with Indian Affairs, who discovers that all the love and Christian charity in the world is sometimes useless. The Commanche raid his community, kill his oldest son, and take his wife and two younger children captive.
He has plans to become a freighter, hauling goods by wagon to outposts and forts. Very basically, it is the story of Britt Johnson, who comes to Texas as a free black man just after the Civil War. I get overwhelmed just thinking of how to describe this book and all it contains.
Well written historical fiction can teach me more than years in a classroom, because it gives me people with personalities, names, faces, motives it leads me step by step into dangerous but lovely landscapes, it shows me why certain things happened as they did, and in this book it explains so much about the western expansion and the tragedy of the American Indian. The cover blurb from the Washington Post on my edition says, "Meticulously researched and beautifully crafted.This is glorious work.".
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